Many supporters of Girls have answered this question with pseudo-feminist critiques that defend Dunham's nudity on the grounds that she's realistically portraying a woman with a normal body type who doesn't have the same hang-ups we do, and why should she? But this doesn't really explain why Dunham's character is nude so much more frequently than anyone else on the show, unless you chalk it up to Hannah Horvath's desperate need for attention, which doesn't seem so far off the mark.

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But if I may, I'd like to offer one more suggestion for why Lena Dunham is naked so much, and why it works so well: It's funny. It's strange that most people in the think-piece fury that is the online coverage of Girls haven't understood it as such, but Lena Dunham's nakedness fits in a long tradition of comedians using their body for gags, from Buster Keaton performing in drag with "Fatty" Arbuckle on down to Chris Farley's fat-guy-in-a-little-coat routine. If there's a double standard here, it may just be that for the past 100 years, we've generally preferred our female comics hot.

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Dunham isn't fat. And it isn't just that her stomach bulges like most Americans' stomachs or that, at least according to some people, her breasts are "misshapen." We're made aware that she doesn't look like her co-stars. She sits awkwardly in the frame. Her dress appears to be ill-fitting on purpose. On Girls, as in her (fantastic) movie Tiny Furniture, naked Dunham often seems to be trying to figure out how to move around, while the other people around her — Allison Williams, shirtless Adam, her own real-life sister — flit by with confidence, or so it seems. One of the great jokes of Girls is that Dunham is always naked while Williams looks petrified to expose any part of herself, physical or otherwise. If you need any more evidence that Lena Dunham's nudity is funny, watch her eat a cupcake in a bathtub, or try to pull off this mesh yellow tanktop, or play nude table tennis with Patrick Wilson. Naked Lena Dunham is hilarious.

And, yes, the nudity is a confrontation: Why are some appalled by it? Why does she flaunt it? What does she think of it? The show projects our insecurities back at us, makes us deal with them.

What's most puzzling of all about the hand-wringing over Lena Dunham's nudity is that Dunham herself understands perfectly well what she's doing. She said so in the New Yorkerwhen the first season of Girls was in production: "When we were auditioning for the other two girls, I was, like, 'Make sure she's tiny enough for it to be funny when she's next to me.'"

There's a myth that attractive people can't be funny. It's wrong, of course, but it gets at a deeper rule of humor, which is that you shouldn't be vain.

Lena Dunham, comic to her core, uses her normal, non-model body in the way any smart comic would. "Make it funny."